Today marks the 70th anniversary of a somber event - the firebombing of Dresden, which will likely be forever linked with Kurt Vonnegut, a very famous writer who was an American POW at the time.
Vonnegut was taken POW during the last German offensive, and was taken to Dresden, which was, at the time, an "open city", meaning that it had escaped the regular bombings that other German cities had been relegated to, because it had no military value. Indeed, according to Vonnegut, when the alarms sounded for the firebombing by that late in the War in Dresden, the local residents reacted in much the same way that they had for some time: with a feeling that they were just going through the motions. They had received similar warnings before, but no bombs had been dropped on the city.
That changed, however, 70 years ago on this day. Overnight, Allied planes flew over the city, and firebombed it. The fire burned so intensely that it took up pretty much all of the oxygen, and so the victim count, despite some variations in estimated numbers of casualties, is incredibly high - well over 100,000. Somewhere, Vonnegut called it the biggest overnight massacre in European, if not human, history. It killed more people than the bomb that dropped on Hiroshima.
Of course, Vonnegut himself was greatly impacted by this. He obviously survived, and his account of the incident is the focal point of numerous of his writings, including his most famous work, Slaughterhouse - 5. He also discusses it more directly in other books and interviews.
There was a debate as to how sorry we should be about this, since the residents of Dresden were Germans, after all, and their aggression had begun the war and imposed the shocking Holocaust on the world. In other words, the people of Dresden were not innocent.
Be that as it may, there were certainly women and children and the elderly in the city. There were likely people who were opposed to Hitler among those killed on that day. When you kill that many people in one shot, surely you are killing some decent people.
So, the question of how necessary and excusable that firebombing was has opened up and become a topic for debate all these many years later.
However, on this day, I just wanted to acknowledge this anniversary of a truly shocking and, yes, tragic event.
Also, since it relates to Kurt Vonnegut so intimately, I figured it would make sense to also add some information about a documentary film that, hopefully, should be released in the near future about Vonnegut, by a man who followed him around with a camera for 25 years! Should be good...
Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time - Dresden
https://vimeo.com/119470928
Unstuck in Time: Q and A with Bob Weide, Kurt Vonnegut’s Documentarian February 10, 2015:
http://www.biographile.com/unstuck-in-time-a-qa-with-bob-weide-kurt-vonneguts-documentarian/39780/?Ref=fb_corp_bio-soc-vonnegutfb
Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time by Robert Weide & Don Argott
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1468288415/kurt-vonnegut-unstuck-in-time
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